Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2012
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 32:1 (Winter 2012).
Abstract
Following the Civil War, the United States government undertook a massive reform of its Indian policy, replacing the antebellum goal of permanently segregating Indian and white populations with that of "civilizing and Christianizing" (i.e., assimilating) Native peoples. To aid in this reform, the federal Indian Bureau successfully petitioned leaders of mainline denominations, including members of America's Catholic Church hierarchy, to enlist personnel to educate Indians in the manners and customs of "Christian citizenship."
In 1886 priests and brothers belonging to the Jesuit's Buffalo Mission and Franciscan sisters of Penance and Christian Charity from Stella-Niagara, New York, arrived on the Rosebud Reservation in present-day South Dakota to pursue the work of converting and "Americanizing" members of the Sicangu tribe of the Lakota.1 Centered at Saint Francis Mission and School, these religious2 adhered to the major presuppositions and practices of the Catholic missiological paradigm of their day. At the core of this paradigm lay the goal of establishing sacramental communities, or churches, whose members loyally subscribed to the tenets and rituals of the church universal.
Comments
Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.